A baby step towards building community

tldr: giving your users a way to see and be seen by one another lays the foundation for community.

For the past three years, Huckleberry has hosted the world’s largest Mother’s Day card exchange:

Huckleberry helps every family thrive by empowering new parents with personalized recommendations to improve their kids’ sleep and other behaviors. Every year, their users opt in to write Mother’s Day cards to one another. They identify themselves by their first name, child’s age, and/or location. No more backstory is needed. The fact that they are a Huckleberry user says enough: they are a fellow parent of a young child trying to improve their family’s day-to-day happiness through the platform. A few weeks before Mother’s Day, users opt in to write supportive messages to one another. While many are generic, others can be very specific. There is no moderation required; all are empathetic and good-hearted, and some are even funny. I’ve written and received these cards three years in a row and was excited to receive one on Sunday. :)

Huckleberry isn’t exactly a community — not by any traditional measure. There are no profile pages or direct user interactions. Yet, every Huckleberry user I’ve ever met lights up upon hearing that I am a fellow sleep tracker and, by extension, share their struggle for more sleep and better control over this uniquely chaotic phase of life.

The card exchange captures this spirit of community by creating a feeling of seeing and being seen among users. Users’ written words, combined with just enough information to convey that the writer is a real person with some shared experience, creates that feeling. It’s fleeting, but powerful.

This may seem like a feature, but it’s more than that. It’s not community just yet, but these small interactions create the preconditions necessary for community to form. Many platforms, like Huckleberry, are not ready to jump into full-fledged community features and deep interactions, but they can begin to lay the foundation. Community starts small. It starts with a way to evoke the feeling of being part of something, of having shared identity or shared struggle, and of seeing and being seen.

I’ve learned a lot from my experience with Huckleberry. What’s really required to create the feeling of seeing and being seen?

• Users need to show that they’re real — they should be represented by some combination of a name/username or face or identifying trait that gives users who interact with them confidence that they’re a real person with real emotions. At this stage, this doesn’t necessarily mean a full-fledged profile page, in fact expecting users to reveal too much too soon can be a mistake. But eventually, as your community connections deepen, richer profiles may become an important feature (my partner Shripriya wrote about that here).
• Users need to interact — even small, ephemeral interactions can do the job. Once users can identify themselves, they need to be able to interact through your platform’s version of the card exchange. It is through these interactions that users see and feel seen. Huckleberry users write cards; Peloton users high-five one another (with the support of heavy on-screen prompts); Medium readers and writers acknowledge one another’s work through highlights and claps.

Seeing and being seen lays the foundation for community — IRL and anywhere virtually. It’s a precondition for meaningful connection and something that virtual platforms, especially, need to get right if they want to transform users of a product into something bigger — a community, a movement, or more.